Today we’d like to introduce you to Russ Gershon.
Russ, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
After growing up in the New York area, I moved to Cambridge/Somerville in 1977 to go to Harvard. I was a fanatical jazz listener and almost immediately landed a jazz show on WHRB-FM, where I could tell the world – at least greater Boston – about the music I loved. Pretty much everything else in my career has followed.
Just before moving to MA, I starting playing saxophone, and during my college years joined with friends to form an eclectic rock band, the Decoders, which eventually made a record, toured in the US and played legendary venues CBGB’s, the Rat and the Mudd Club. This was followed by a couple of busy years in a popular Boston band, the Sex Execs, who opened for the Tubes, the Motels, the Stray Cats, Modern English, etc.
After the Execs broke up, I gravitated back to jazz and a year at Berklee College. At the end of the year, I started a rehearsal band with a motley mob of rock scene and music school friends. We debuted on 12/17/85 as the Either/Orchestra, an 11 piece big band that approached the full jazz tradition with a punk attitude. After making our first LP – home brewed a la Sun Ra and the DIY punk ethic – we began years of crisscrossing the US in vans, taking our unique approach to small towns and big cities, to the delight of audiences and critics alike. The group was an incubator for many future jazz stars like John Medeski, Matt Wilson and Miguel Zenon, and earned me a Grammy nomination in an arranging category.
In the mid-1990’s, I became interested in Ethiopian music, and began arranging it for the E/O. One thing led to another, and before you know it we were in Addis Ababa, the first Americans ever to play the prestigious Ethiopian Music Festival. This led to collaborations with the greats of Ethiopian music including Mahmoud Ahmed and Mulatu Astatke, with whom we have played all over Europe and North America.
Throughout, I have played with many other jazz and rock artists, from Cab Calloway and the Four Tops to Morphine and Medeski Martin & Wood, plus a million other commercial and artistic gigs and recordings. In recent years I have been the music director of an absolutely delightful Latin Bugalú band, Lookie Lookie, which features music from the 1960’s. Other projects have included directing a live rendition of David Bowie’s last album, “Blackstar,” playing in Steely Dan, Marvin Gaye and Traffic repertory projects, and leading a jazz trio to feature my own saxophone, flute, singing and keyboard playing. We always play music by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, who blew my mind in 1975 at Carnegie, a major milestone on my road.
I founded Accurate Records in 1987 to put out the first E/O record, “Dial ‘E,’” and have put out over 100 titles of jazz, rock and film music by scores of artists. Recent releases include work by the Ghost Train Orchestra and trumpeter Bob Merrill, with Accurate’s tenth E/O album, “The Collected Unconscious,” in the pipeline.
After years of working as an itinerant visiting artist, ten years ago I started taking full semester teaching jobs. I have enjoyed teaching college level music history, grade school band and chorus, and middle school instrumental lessons.
I feel very fortunate to have worked with some of the most talented artists of our lifetime, and to have had the opportunity to build several great bands which have created their own legacies. Every project, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from commercial to artistic, working with musician’s ages five to 75 (literally), is an opportunity to learn something and share the joy of being alive with collaborators and audience. I have made friends all over the world whom I would never have met in any other way. Music has made our planet a much bigger and much smaller place for me.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Nobody ever said “become a musician and your life will be easy” to me, quite the opposite. As a naive young fellow, I romanticized the struggles of my music heroes, but in some ways that’s what it takes to plunge into this world, intense and beautiful, frustrating and rewarding.
I have a million stories of contending with financial, logistical, person, psychological and cultural obstacles to be able to make the music I have and live this life, but everyone has those. I might have been slightly more ambitious, clever, resourceful or just tunnel-visioned than many others, but it is par for the course.
Alright – so let’s talk business. Tell us about Accurate Records – what should we know?
At this point, my business has several components. First and foremost, as always, is playing music on saxophones, flute (a recent addition), singing, composing, arranging music, leading bands. Sometimes it is driven by demand – clubs, concerts, other folks’ projects, clients – and sometimes it’s driven by inner desire.
I have put a lot of energy into education over the past ten years. Before I was able to play professionally, I was an informal but passionate music educator as a radio DJ. Now, after forty years of playing, I can actually perform a lot of the music I used to play on the radio as well as music that didn’t even exist then – I’ve even composed a bunch of it. I love sharing what I know with students of all ages, and there is nothing more wonderful to me, after dragging my butt out of bed way too early, than singing songs with five through eight year old kids. (It becomes more complicated past that age.) I taught jazz, blues, pop and classical history in college for four years, which was rewarding in a different way. We live in an era where the massive amounts of instantly available information can easily turn into an undifferentiated mass. I try to make music history a telling cross section of general history, enabling the students to see into the past through the lens of music and musicians, so that they can develop a better understanding of the present.
The record business, as most people know, has been radically transformed by the internet. I used to be able, as a tiny Indy label, to sell a substantial number of CD’s, but now it is very, very difficult. I do maintain the label for its catalogue, for my own work, and for releases with a few artists with whom I really like to work.
Working with so many people, from the fifty plus members of the Either/Orchestra, to the hundred artists on Accurate, to the myriad other collaborators and hundreds of students makes me my own company, you could say. What sets me apart is my broad taste in music, my wide-ranging knowledge of the many genres I have played, the variety of different jobs I have done in the music industry to advance my own artistic vision. I also really do get along with most people and find it easy to respect them for whatever they can do with music, virtuoso or beginner, as long as they are willing to connect.
Any shoutouts? Who else deserves credit in this story – who has played a meaningful role?
So many people have helped me along the way, my mother who is a musician, my ad exec father who provided me with a great education in many things, and whose skepticism about my career made me work harder, the early musical collaborators when I was a kid who joined me in making music outside of school. I must name Jay Joseph, a talented bass player who made me start playing sax, trumpeter John Mulkerin and the late drummer Rob Reynolds, much more advanced musicians who gave me a chance to play with them long before I deserved it.
I have benefited from a fantastic, old school liberal arts Harvard education with professors like Hillary Putnam, Stanley Cavell, T.J. Clarke, Martha Nussbaum and Steven Jay Gould. A year at Berklee allowed me to study with Alex Ulanowsky, Bill Pierce, Andy McGhee, Ken Pullig, and Donald Brown. Graduate school at Tufts in my early 40’s gave me David Locke, John McDonald, Michael Ullman, Janet Schmalfeldt, all wonderful teachers and humans.
Every band I’ve ever been in has been full of ridiculously talented and dedicated people and I’ve learned from all of them. The early Either/Orchestra crowd was particularly edifying to me, as most of them had had musical experiences in areas that I, their leader, lacked: Tom Halter, John Carlson, Russell Jewell, Curtis Hasselbring, Jerome Deupree, Mike Rivard, John Dirac, Andrew D’Angelo, Charlie Kohlhase, Matt Wilson, Bob Nieske, John Turner, John Medeski, Chris Taylor and on and on. Later E/O guys, most much younger than me, kept pushing me: Miguel Zenon, Jaleel Shaw, Henry Cook, Dan Kaufman, Greg Burk, Colin Fisher, Dan Rosenthal, Rick McLaughlin, Joel Yennior, Harvey Wirht, Pablo Bencid, Godwin Louis, Hailey Niswanger, Oscar Suchanek, Mark Zaleski, and Gilson Schachnik. I have to mention the Lookie Lookie gang, who have helped get me through some stressful years: Chris Maclachlan, Jorge Arce, Rick Barry, Ken Winokur, and Scott Getchell.
Francis Falceto is a French music producer and researcher who has made it his life’s work to connect the music and musicians of Ethiopia to the world at large. His efforts, first via the records of vintage Ethiopian music he released, then directly by teaching me about the history of Ethiopian music and ultimately bringing the Either/Orchestra to Ethiopia, has greatly changed my life and career.
Conguero, singer and all around great human being Vicente Lebron deserves special mention. He grew up with none of the material support that I did, but this has done nothing to prevent him from leading a rich and colorful life, making a huge impact on multiple communities with his playing and his humanity. He’s been a great teacher and collaborator for me and everybody in our music world. One of my greatest accomplishments has been in giving him the opportunity to see more of the world – and for more of the world to see him – than might otherwise have happened.
Contact Info:
- Address: 343 Medford St
Somerville MA 02145 - Website: either-orchestra.org, accuraterecords.com
- Phone: 617-899-9685
- Email: russ@accuraterecords.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/russ.gershon.1 @lookie,lookie,theband @eitherorchestra @
- Twitter: @russgershon
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